poetry may–june 2013 • 19 down on his sofa. There was not much light left, and he didn’t like to work with artificial light, the buzzing of the lamps. Aren’t you a sensitive damn thing, he told himself. First tricksy pawns and now noise. At his age . . . oh now, at my age, goodness, when did I become so tricksy? And he missed her more and more right then because that was her voice in his head, his little queen who’d so long ago now disappeared. My board is empty without you, he told her. The first science was biology. The Designers were given a list of words that started small (cell and spine and eye and DNA and RNA) and became longer (flagella, intestine, lymphocyte, keratinase). They sat in the garden, the trees peering over the Designers’ shoulders, trying to decide what to do with all this vocabulary. “We can have words!” shouted one Designer, older than the rest, more traditional, more experienced . “No words, it’s all about the plants!” the Lady Designer shrieked. She stood up, and although she was tiny against the Old Designer’s bulk, he wobbled and fell back onto the grass. The Handsome Young Designer said nothing, dreaming of rhododendrons, cacti, trailing ivy. He took the set along to the shop when it was dry. He’d had a terrible time with the pawns, drunk much more than usual just to get it finished. His fingers wouldn’t do it anymore. At some point, faint and dizzy, he’d heard the pieces taunting him, and it was all he could do to stop himself from beheading every single one. “Shut the fuck up,” he’d mumbled, sinking into the sofa. “Come back, my queen, come back, it’s just a game. You know that.” The shop owner didn’t look too closely, the work was always good, just handed over cash. The painter put half of it deep in his bag and went down to his local pub. A pattern, never changing. Just getting more ingrained. The Designers were working on the section modelled on a brain. “You have to have one to know one,” grumbled the Old Designer, knowing the Lady was behind him. She contemplated shoving him but didn’t want to injure flora. She was modelling a vine into neuronal connections while the Young Designer she had eyes for was immersed in contemplating dendrites. “Using them to create them!” she had joked to him, but Placing Everything on the Line Zvonko Karanović A car stops in the middle of the screen a gentleman walks out dressed in black, wearing a hat, grabs a frightened girl by the arm blackmails her to marry him desperate, she jumps off the building and all the newspapers print the news on their front pages the machinery of death always goes hand in hand with the machinery of large circulations Bogart answers the phone and takes the case a pursuit begins with many guns drawn the bad guy escapes but dies in the end and justice finally prevails the machinery of winning over evil always goes hand in hand with a bloody resolution the girl is still dead outside it is still raining Translation from the Serbian By Biljana D. Obradović Zvonko Karanović is a poet and fiction writer born in Niš, Serbia. Like the poets of the Beat generation he takes as his models, he has traveled widely throughout Europe, hitchhiking and often changing jobs. He has worked as a journalist, editor, radio host, DJ, concert organizer, and for thirteen years was the owner of a music store. He has published ten collections of poems and a novel trilogy, The Diary of Deserters. Biljana D. Obradović, a Serbian American poet, translator, and professor of English at Xavier University of Louisiana (New Orleans), teaches poetry writing. She has published three collections of poems, most recently Little Disruptions (2012) and four books of translations into English and Serbian. She is coediting a second anthology of contemporary Serbian poetry with Dubravka Djurić in which Karanović will be included. Editorial note: To read an interview with Zvonko Karanović and listen to a bilingual reading of this...